If you’re going to nick TwitPics, it pays to read the small print first.
That could be a salutary lesson for the Daily Mail, currently facing a bill of almost ten times the going rate after lifting a professional photographer’s pics from the web and then attempting to claim that as they were "in the public domain", they didn’t …

I always thought...

Edited either by Chicken Licken or the proverbial sandwich board man proclaiming "The End of the World is Nigh!" (particularly if you're in their definition of "middle class" - i.e. earning >£40k)

Then again, from recent news stands, it seems as though their arch rival (Express [1]) seems to be getting in on the act as well - they already appear to have started their version of the oncological ontology project...

Arrogance

The sheer arrogance of claiming that the photos were in the public domain is.. well what you would expect.

Surely a paper of the calibre of the Mail would know that /everything/ is copyright unless explicitly described, via a Creative Commons licence for example.

Oh, right.

Mind you, most of the red tops have always been like this. A company I once worked with used to have to have editions from all over the country posted to them by newsagents (at a huge cost...) to make sure they were paying for all the photographs published as the contribution accounts department usually only saw those in the London edition. Bill board posters were another common "oops... forgot we had to pay..." - usually they only managed to get paid for them if one of their photographers was about and actually /saw/ it.

But best of luck, and I can't see how the Mail can back out of this one. A tough lesson learnt, until the next time.

Creative Commons is also not Public Domain

correction: anything under Creative Commons is copywritten also. it has to be put into the public domain to be in the public domain. the Creative Commons Foundatation may have some language that does this, it's not under creative commons per se, because if it is put into the public domain you are not licensing it. (except in countries like Japan which do not recognise the public domain, which may require an alternitive license stating you intened to permit all users to use it for any legal useage, without attribution (I think that would get around all moral rights, but am by no means an expert in japanese law))

The Mail should sue her

Pick the bones out of that, cuntbubbles

The Daily Fail steal copy and pictures as a matter of course, as well as being hateful rabble-rousing mean-spirit, racist, homophobic and xenophobic hate mongers. It would be a waste of good urine to help with with flames.

you missed a bit

Your suggested text is incomplete for a story in the Daily Heil.

There's no mention of the impact of these licences will have on house prices. Or how they increase/decrease the risk of cancer. Or that it's all the fault of welfare scrounging asylum seekers and/or single mothers.

As any corporate lawyer says...

Stolen images are the least of their problems...

The Daily Mail has been awful to read for quite a while now, poor grammar, bad spelling, missing paragraphs or repeating paragraphs, photos with 'Write Caption here' left on them. It is lazy journalism, and if you ask me, it is because they are just employing a load of bloody foreigners, with poor English skills, to write for them because they are cheap.

Strange.

Not unusual

The Mail on Sunday pinched one of my photos off the (clearly copyrighted) Web site of a musician of my acquaintance in order to illustrate a scandal piece they printed on page 3. The quality wasn't great as it was a cut and past job from a website.

I never did get round to sending them a bill. To add insult to injury they didn't provide a credit (but I bet they paid for the agency photo they also used).

Bill them now then?

Bill them!

For God's sake, send them an invoice! They'll keep on treating the web as a free content goldmine if you let them get away with it! Not only that but why shouldn't you get paid? If you walked in to their offices and took a monitor they'd suddenly know all about the law I reckon.

Circulation?

She shouldn't really worry! The Daily Wails circulation used to be so bad that to 'boost' the numbers you could get a free copy at any Little Chef! And now they don't bother stocking it as it was putting off their customers!

This photographer clearly mistaken

Copyright is apparently a very difficult concept to grasp

I've had to deal with similar issues in the past. For me it's not about the money, but about the basic decency of asking if you're allowed to use my photos. And it appears that's already too much to ask.

http://floor-revamp.fr/

And apparently she's a bit miffed that I contacted her webhost in order to complain about copyright infringement. Who else should I have contacted? Her? She has already demonstrated to be completely clueless about the whole copyright thing. And besides, I've stopped being nice about this sort of thing. I certainly see no reason not to as I regularly deal with people who are capable of doing the right thing.

I for one wish Emily James the best with her lawsuit. Harsh actions sadly seem to be the only way to get it through people's thick skulls that because something's on the internet doesn't mean it's free or yours to (ab)use.

Keep Us Informed

good luck to the photographer

looks like he's already making some headway there anyway.

I discovered someone using one of my images without permission, they wouldn't pay for it or remove it when asked. Turns out it was automated blagging, they hit a search term, scrape the top ten or so thumbnail images off Bing, wrap a bit of advertising around and hey presto! instant blagomatic web pages.

The way I see it, there are two possibilities:

1. She should sue their asses off, like £40 for the use of the photo, £1000 for taking it without consent, and £198,960 for thinking they could get away with it. In my opinion, their later response has moved from simple licence misunderstanding/f*ckwitism to outright blatant copyright theft. (after all, how much in the course of a day of the Fail is a grand? if they coughed up and added an extra few hundred for the condition of silence, nobody would be any the wiser...) Maybe if there's a lawyer willing to do a nice profile pro bono they could look for everybody who has a grievance with the Fail as, well, come on. Copyright is copyright, theft is theft. We have this girl's picture and an El Reg reader... one more an the Fail loses its publication licence. Oh, what, it's good enough for *us* freetards but not good enough for corporate freetardery? Like I said, copyright is copyright and theft is theft.

2. She should accept the £40 offered, on the understanding that the Daily Mail is explicity saying if something is posted on-line, then it is in the public domain and can be used as and when for whatever purpose without bothering to provide credit or compensation. Like, say, the ENTIRE content of the Fail website (not that I'd want to copy any of it, I only go there to read Littlejohn for light entertainment value). As our sources of free info are a pictures site and the Fail's site, it would appear we could logically extrapolate this to apply to *all* on-line content. I wait with bated breath to see what a certain Mr. Murdoch will throw across his office... A phone? (been done) A chair? (been done)

Strike One

Totally agree with the general vibe from the commentards here ...

... but my question is are these all the same commentards who also comment bitterly about not being able to thieve - I mean torrent - movies and music with impunity? If not, where are they ... surely they should be arguing how this should be fine fine fine?

Most of this type (including me)

probably think that artists get a crap deal out of the recording industry, and would do better if the system properly revolved around gigs, and not on the selling of music or TV in rubbish ways. Put it this way, I'm a big Lost fan, even when it had its troubles. I got up to watch the final episode on Monday morning at 5am, adverts and all on Sky1, I'm going to probably download it to watch it in the interim (mostly because I don't have an HD TV) and I plan on buying the full boxset when it comes out. I don't think it's great to pirate stuff, and to be completely honest when I did pirate things willynilly it was when I was a student, didn't really think as much about consequences, and didn't have as much cash to spend on stuff. Now I'll generally buy stuff and only very occasionally pirate, mostly for TV shows that I've missed for whatever reason, or for difficult to find music.

The difference with photography is that there isn't another way to sell the content. It's not like being able to gig, or to show repeats, or to sell a DVD, your only real way to sell this sort of content is by selling it to newspapers. I think that the other big difference is that the Mail is profiting from theft. I don't, for instance, agree with pirated DVDs, selling something that isn't yours clearly is a lost sale because someone has bought something that could have been sold somewhere else. If I'm watching a TV show that I missed at the weekend, or listening to something I couldn't find anywhere else, I would equate it to watching a rerun when I've got time, or listening to the radio. I'd just like to highlight that I will buy things that I find enjoyable. For instance, a few years ago I downloaded Silent Hunter III and thoroughly enjoyed it, when it was available on Steam I bought it, not because of anything it allowed me to do, purely because I liked the game and wanted to credit the developers. Go figure..